The crossed hammer-and-sickle insignia of the Bolshevik revolution has a sense of certainty to it. But it’s an old design, and a lot has happened since it first declared the coming triumph of the proletariat. So Marks (2011) the first work you see on entering Frith Street Gallery, has a...
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“The Arab Spring is (not quite) Old News”
Old news. That’s how Fred Sicre (of Abraaj Capital, Art Dubai’s partner) dubbed the Arab Spring. The flaming politics of the last year’s events have been reduced to the mere glimmers in the Emirati’s up-and-coming art fair. In the past three years, the...
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Partial, relaxed, and idiosyncratic are not typically positive associations for large survey shows. But these have been multiplying recently, and perhaps that is why that most venerable of panoramas, the Whitney Biennial, finds itself relieved, a little, of its historical pretensions towards completeness. Any survey is just one of an...
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Aleksandra Domanović’s practice analyzes socio-political transformations through the production of images and narratives largely based on popular culture. By decontextualizing and reconfiguring media content, Domanović delves into the accumulative nature of information and its intrinsic indexicality. Like many artists born on the communist side of the Iron Curtain, she is...
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![Jonathas de Andrade, 4000 Disparos [4000 Shots], 2010.](http://www.art-agenda.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/1.-Jonathas-de-Andrade-322x256.jpg "1.")
The Grand Inquisitor and Diogenes are crucial figures of the ungovernable—one as cynical exercise of power with impunity, the other as mocking embrace of bare life and irreverence towards authority. These two figures continue to represent the polarities we inhabit: the unofficially ungovernable states and institutions that wield great power...
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A few months ago there was a photograph circulating on Facebook that made my stomach turn. Not knowing where to find it now, I simply (if wincingly) typed into Google the following: “photograph of Indian chief crying.” The image immediately appeared, conjured magically out of the internet ether. There he...
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